Occult Shard - It's okay to quit

Finally, a post-1.03 1h weapon with 1k+ dps. How much is it worth? See how much I sold this for after the jump.

No elemental damage? What do I do with this, club someone?

This wand is more than a 4 digit piece of eye candy. It was a symbol of salvation.

Let me set the context: It was a day after 1.03 came out. Demon hunters had gotten 3 nerfs:

1. Items with Increased Attack Speed was nerfed. (halved)
2. Nether Tentacles was nerfed; it now hit an enemy once per spell, which comes out to a 2-4x loss in actual damage.
3. MF was stealth nerfed in act 3+. (Lookin' at you blizzard)

What this meant was that farming act 3 suddenly became the most inhospitable task ever. When you suddenly lose more than half your real damage output, the game feels... hard. I felt weak. Trash mobs didn't die to my spells anymore; they came up to me and actually attempted to attack me! How rude.

And boss fights. Boss fights become drawn out, and more importantly... confusing! You mean to tell me Azmodan actually summons monsters from those summoning totems? And he has a continuous laser beam attack?! I used to kill him before his second death pool came out; I had never seen those moves at all.

...

Well that's what I felt for about 20 minutes. That the game was unfair. But like any reasonable adult who doesn't go straight to the forums to cry about it, I adapted.

IAS

Nerfed

Sure, ias was nerfed. And they never fixed ias on certain legendaries (I'm still sitting with 2 pairs of Inna's and a broken Zunimasas). Luckily, my Demon Hunter was already using a bow; stacking ias was never that important for me. I had only lost around 20k dps, from 135k to 115k. Not the end of the world.

What I feel sorry for are the xbow users that suddenly realized that they couldn't kite anymore. Their attack speeds became so slow that they couldn't efficiently attack and dodge at the same time. Those are the real victims of this nerf. As long as I could kite, I could fight. I just needed to suck it up.

Nether Tentacles

This only cost 10 hatred?

Nether Tentacles was gone. But this needed to happen. There is no build diversity when a 10 hatred cost spell can do upwards of 1000% damage by hitting the same target many, many times. There is no build diversity when NT, an area of effect ability, deals more damage than a single-target spell like Guided Arrows.

I had always assumed they would increase the hatred cost, and they effectively did what I wanted. When you remove the multi-hitting aspect, it brings the spell down to the level of other skills like Ball lightning, Impale, Cluster Arrow.  Now, I tried many builds, but eventually settled with Ball Lightning. The skill has massive aoe and does its job very well; spam a couple into a room and things die, and that's what I needed to clear act 3 quickly. Guided arrow was the tool for single targets, and ball lightning was the tool for many targets.

Ball lightning actually surpassed NT in some cases. It is very good for clearing rooms that you don't want to test with your tender body.  It is very good for killing spiderlings spawned by Cydaea. It is very good for shooting at an elite while simultaneously hitting things that are behind you.

The build I use today is here (if I have Nat's ring equipped, I switch Preparation for Vault). Of course, a skill layout shows very little of the correct usage of it. In a future post, I'll examine this setup and have a video of how I currently do Cydaea runs.

MF

Whoops, wrong MF

Here is where I agree with the conspiracy nuts on the forums. Mostly because Blizzard admitted it and fixed it in a later patch. But also because... well... IT WAS COMPLETELY NOTICEABLE.

It's not a statistical deviation when, pre-patch, you farm an average of X rares every run, and now you get X/2 or X/3. I'm a mathematician at heart; when I looked for an act 3 run to do, I wrote down the time and number of rares produced by each run. Before 1.03, I was rocking a very solid 10 rares per 15 minutes on average. I also wrote down the average number of ilevel61+ rares. Now I know that white iLvl63s are the same as yellow ones (so I should actually write down every ilvl63 that drops), but on average, the number of ilvl63 rares should eventually smooth out into a working average.

Post-patch, I again logged my numbers. And the results were shocking. Half as many "good" (62+) rares per run. Every run corroborated with the truth that was developing before me: Act 3 was no longer profitable.

Who would really want to play a game where their gear magically gets half as good and the monsters suddenly dropped half as many items? I can understand why many people quit the game at this point.

The Occult Shard

Like any movie cliche, what did I do when I realized that I wasn't wanted in Act 3 anymore? I wandered the deserts.

Look, more hidden footprints!

The deserts of Act 2. (How convenient, right?)

They had increased the drop rates in act 2, so it looked like a safe haven to figure out what the game wanted out of us. The monsters were weaker so I could test different builds and different items. This is where I settled upon Ball Lightning, after becoming convinced that Impale, Frost Arrow, and Cluster Arrows were just not cut out for act 3.

With the exception of impossibly good gear, the key to farming Act 3 with a Demon Hunter is simply to use spells with a long, long range. Elites can't wall you if they are a screen and a half away. Elites can't vortex you if they are a screen and a half away. As long as the DH can create a proper area to kite, and kites properly, there is very little risk of dying. The game becomes comically easy. The problem with the 3 skills I just mentioned is that their spell range is just too low. I don't care if critical Impales can take out 10% of a champion's life bar... if I die after throwing the 5th impale, they heal and I've wasted my time.

 Act 2 is also where I came to the conclusion to build tanky (but still kite). I came upon this miraculous discovery when a fallen hit me. And I didn't die. Now for those who were in prepatch Act 3 with a Demon Hunter, you will know that anything kills you. A spearman was your worst enemy; their attack animations were so fast that you could be in an attack animation and simply could not move in time. Without 30k+ hp and massive resists, you were as durable as those wooden doors in the Keeps that nobody seems to know how to open without destroying the door itself.

So, Act 2 was good. The monsters were perfect training for Act 3. The NPCs were nice and wouldn't supposedly loot your stuff back after you died. And best of all, the map was so bright that I didn't even have to raise the gamma to see that bastard spearman lurking in the corner.

 But there was always this annoying little gremlin in the back of my mind whispering, "These drops are shit. These drops are shit". It's effectively a 4x drop nerf from pre-patch Act 3 after all. I would fill my inventory with rares and on average, there would be one or two Ilvl63s. Even after working out a build that didn't suck, the rewards just weren't there. Nobody wants to spend 3x more time to farm the exact same loot. This is what ultimately made me want to quit.

But then, like any benevolent trickster god, this damn thing fell on my lap.

I'm valuable

The wand spoke to me. It said, "I want you to sell me on the RMAH like the greedy bastard you are. And I want you to keep playing, you son of a bitch. You want more of me."

And of course, it was completely right about me. I saw dollar signs. I wanted to keep playing. After all, I'm the guy who played so much D2:LOD that the golden color of uniques was permanently ingrained in my mind. At some point I was seeing gold everywhere. "Wow, a unique toaster. Better bring this to Cain," I would say.

At this point, you're probably wondering why I didn't mention anything about the wand itself. That's because it kind of sucks. The damage is high but it's pretty much just a very bland wand.

Scroll down to see how much it sold for.

Yeah, it didn't actually sell for that much.